Eating Just As Much But Enjoying It Less

By Daniel Akst

Dieters don’t eat less than other people, but they do feel guiltier about their food intake.

That’s the implication of a new paper by researchers in the Netherlands who staged three experiments to test whether habitual dieters really did limit their intake, and how these individuals felt after eating. In all three, female undergraduates were told they were participating in a supermarket taste test and given questionnaires that measured the extent to which they engage in “dietary restraint, defined as ‘the intentional and sustained restriction of caloric intake for the purpose of weight loss or weight maintenance.’” Participants were also assessed on guilt.

The tasting occurred in private to eliminate the possibility of embarrassment, but bowls were secretly weighed before and after each session. In all three experiments, which varied slightly, the restrained eaters ate as much as the other volunteers did. But they scored higher on guilt about eating.